Today (Thursday 22nd October), a criminal investigation was launched by the Metropolitan Police Cyber Crime Unit following a significant and sustained cyberattack on our website yesterday. That investigation is ongoing, but unfortunately there is a chance that some of the following data has been compromised: names, addresses, date of birth, phone numbers, email addresses, TalkTalk account information, credit card details and/or bank details. We are continuing to work with leading cyber crime specialists and the Metropolitan Police to establish exactly what happened and the extent of any information accessed.

Dido Harding, CEO, said: “TalkTalk constantly updates its systems to make sure they are as secure as possible against the rapidly evolving threat of cyber crime, impacting an increasing number of individuals and organisations. We take any threat to the security of our customers’ data extremely seriously and we are taking all the necessary steps to understand what has happened here. As a precaution, we are contacting all our customers straight away with information, support and advice around yesterday’s attack.”

The following letter has been shared with TalkTalk customers:

We are very sorry to tell you that on Thursday 22nd October a criminal investigation was launched by the Metropolitan Police Cyber Crime Unit following a significant and sustained cyberattack on our website on Wednesday 21st October. The investigation is ongoing, but unfortunately there is a chance that some of the following data may have been accessed:

Wim Remes, Rapid7 a écrit :The tactic of inundating an application with traffic to hide the real attack ( smokescreening ) going on at the same time is very common nowadays. By distracting the target, the attacker buys more time to focus on the assets they are really after. Organisations can address this by implementing multi-layer monitoring systems.

Brian Krebs a écrit :A source close to the investigation who spoke on condition of anonymity told KrebsOnSecurity that the hacker group who demanded the £80,000 ransom ( via Bitcoin ) provided TalkTalk with copies of the tables from its user database as evidence of the breach. The database in question, the source said, appears related to at least 400,000 people who have recently undergone credit checks for new service with the company.

More than 4 million users of TalkTalk are at risk after a major data breach hit the mobile carrier’s database. Trust levels in TalkTalk dropped, as the real problem resided within the poor or nonexistent data encryption.

Graham Cluley a écrit :So, let's imagine a big company, with the sensitive details of 4,000,000 customers stored on a server. That data is there because it gets used. For billing, for marketing, for tech support. But it's encrypted, so only authorised users can access it. Now let's imagine a wily hacker, who uses an SQL injection vulnerability or a PHP vulnerability or any one of a zillion other vulnerabilities, to get root priviledge, and is now logged on as the root user. He can now intercept and log on as any user on that computer and because he's an authorised user, he has all the access to the sensitive traffic or database that the kosher user has. That's why "Is it encrypted" is a silly question.

(George Osborne, GCHQ) a écrit :"The experience of TalkTalk shows how cyber attack can suddenly go from a theoretical risk to a massive business cost"

To all business customers a écrit :We have emailed all our customers who could have been affected and continue to use the media and other channels to update you as the situation develops. We know that issues like this can be worrying so we've partnered with Noodle, a credit reporting service from Callcredit to offer 12 months of credit monitoring alerts for free. This is available to all business customers who could have been affected by this incident.

TalkTalk a écrit :LONDON The chief executive of TalkTalk (TALK.L) received 2.8 million pounds ($4.1 million) in pay and share bonuses for the last 12 months, despite the telecoms company suffering a cyber attack in October that put the data of thousands of customers at risk.

Dido Harding, who received 550,000 pounds in base pay, said she would donate her 220,000 pound annual cash bonus to charity following the hack on its business[...]